The Black Tides of Heaven

, #1

Paperback, 236 pages

English language

Published Sept. 26, 2017 by Tor.com.

ISBN:
978-0-7653-9541-2
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4 stars (52 reviews)

The Black Tides of Heaven is one of a pair of standalone introductions to JY Yang's Tensorate Series. For more of the story you can read its twin novella The Red Threads of Fortune

Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as children. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While his sister received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, he saw the sickness at the heart of his mother's Protectorate.

A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue to play a pawn in his mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in …

2 editions

The Black Tides of Heaven

3 stars

I'm reading the Tensorate novellas as part of the SFFBookClub's "sequel month". I've read this once upon a time in the past, but haven't read the other three yet.

I enjoyed this book a good bit, but mostly as a setup for future novellas. This book follows twins Mokoya and Akeha who are under the thumb of their mother the head of the Protectorate. Thematically, the book is about resisting the will of fate, against prophetic visions that Mokoya has but also arguably against the inexorable will of their mother. It's also a story of the resistance of common people against the will of an empire that controls magic.

I think the novella does a lot of work of worldbuilding and characterization in its short length. If I had any criticism, it's that it is much more focused on hitting emotional beats than about narrative beats. The sections skip through …

reviewed The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang (Tensorate, #1)

Well, yeah, but, no?

3 stars

I really wanted to like this: I am a big fan of what Aliette de Bodard does with traditional Vietnamese influences both in her Xuya Universe and her Dominion of the Fallen series, so this one, with its Wǔxíng based magic system (Chinese, not Vietnamese version) looked great, and challenging Western binary gender representation is a bonus. One of my students recently did her graduation film on queer identity in a German-Vietnamese context, queer reclaimed Guanyin and all, so you could say this ticked boxes.

Unluckily, the novel is hamstrung by a meandering plot, shallow characterisation and haphazard world-building, with a magic-reinforced version of Imperial Chinese authority sitting smack in the middle of an otherwise unexplained technological revolution. As a piece of fantastic literature, this is simply not that interesting, I’m sorry to say (how good a novel of queer identity it is, I can’t tell, being as a heterosexual …

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

3.5 stars. I can't decide whether to round up or down. Probably down? I'll come back.

Fill in my usual novella complaints about how I like the plot and worldbuilding but it's not long enough to do the premise justice. I know I'm a broken record. I know it's my own fault and I should just stop reading novellas.

(Maybe someday I will be able to endure insta!love as just one of those things that allo people have to write that I will never understand. But for now: EVERYONE FALLS IN LOVE TOO FAST.)

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'GoodReads'

2 stars

I always appreciate when authors take a "show, don't tell" approach, but the result in this case is a scattershot of characters and groups of people without any clear sense of motivation. This is a story where, as the saying goes, stuff just happens. In fiction with particularly beautiful use of the language that can be fine, but that isn't found here. The characters too often speak in cliches. Many of those characters are somewhat stock in nature - the evil empress, the kindly old monk, the handsome young doctor, etc.

There is some compelling stuff here about gender and a mildly interesting system of magic called "slack," but I don't think I'll check out the remaining three books in the series.

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I came to this after reading one of those long-winded epics which litter the fantasy gender, and it was a great relief. The writing is sharp, characterisation puts an illusion of flesh upon folk-tale actors, and offers the reader no opportunity to wallow. Gender is fluid, allusions to romance terse, the main relationship being that between the twin children of the ruler of the book's universe - in this the author complies with one of the main themes in fantasy, the heavy weight put upon innate gifts, passed down through a blood-line. After I finished it, I immediately went over to ebooks and purchased the next volume.

Oh, by the way, Yang is absolutely right about the covers: they are superb.

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'GoodReads'

5 stars

Second read through: quite excellent. Better the second time around!

Something I hadn't remembered from the first read is the cool background on the title of the book, specifically this quote about free-will roughly 2/3 through the book:



"No matter what we did, her visions happened anyway. Future events can be set in stone. Where is your free will in that?"



Yongcheow folded careful hands over his belly. "But in those cases, you did do something, didn't you? You went to find the new Head Abbot. Your mother's purging Machinists. Some things might be fixed, but everything around then can be changed. That's the part that counts."



"A test. That's the Obedient belief, isn't it? Everything is a test from the heavens."



A considered silence shimmered. Then Yongcheow spoke. "The saying goes, 'The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.' To which a wise teacher said, 'But …

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Good job laying out both the social and magical world building. I like the justification for the gender-linguistic use of singular "they", but admit that it would be easier to follow if the pronoun user were not part of a pair of twins. I will be looking for #2, the complementary lead-in novella.

Review of 'The Black Tides of Heaven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The Protector is ruling the Empire with a protective but iron hand, crushing any who oppose her. Sometimes she needs help and as "payment" for that help she promised the abbott of the Grand Monastery one of her children. And so the twins Mokoya and Akeha are born. This novella is the story of their life.

It is also a story about prophecy (likely self-fulfilling) versus free-will, personal choices in a world where gender is fluid (everyone is genderless their/they until they decide to become one or the other or remain "unconfirmed", to identify with a gender at an early age is unusual), a story of magic (the Tensor magic of the 5 natures that could do with a little more definition - I have hopes for the sequel), technology (guns, and machines, some powered by magic, some not), myth and religion.

I enjoyed this fast moving plot that covers …

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Subjects

  • Twins--Fiction.
  • Prophecy--Fiction.
  • Imaginary wars and battles--Fiction.

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